Students are sleepwalking into anti-Semitic hysteria
Maajid Nawaz - "Times of Israel", January 25, 2017
Never again, was the promise. We remember, the
pledge. And yet, amid record levels of anti-Semitic attacks recorded
nationally by the watchdog CST, anti-Semitism on our campuses has become
a major problem. Sadly, my own alma mater SOAS University of London is a
main culprit. This
week SOAS Jewish society’s president Avrahum Sanger revealed that
anti-Semitism has found its foothold firmly in Bloomsbury, claiming that
some students are too afraid to wear the Star of David or speak Hebrew
at the country’s foremost languages school. The union – where I once served as an officer –
had already voted to boycott Israel by the time it decided to hold an
Israeli Apartheid Week last year. This came after a vigil was arranged
on SOAS’s steps where among those mourned was Muhannad Shafeq Halabi,
who killed two Israeli men in Jerusalem. Students were mourning a terrorist.
Israel Apartheid Week on a UK campus
Jewish students have been pushing for kosher
food to be reinstated at the union snack shop, and for a multi-faith
prayer room to be made available once again after it was recently
closed. Despite this, there are two prayer rooms for
Muslims only. And these are segregated, one for each gender, in case you
had hoped for some radicalism to hail from the university that prides
itself as being the most progressive in the UK. No wonder then that a freedom of information
request from last year found only 39 students comfortable enough to
declare they were Jewish. As a SOAS alumnus who remembers the pride I
took in my school’s multiethnic, culturally rich and diverse student
body, this is depressing. From SOAS to another campus in Bloomsbury, anti-Semitic aggression came to be openly displayed at the University College London. Last October dozens of police officers were called to quell a violent anti-Israel protest that left student organisers like Devora Khafi terrified and suffering a panic attack, as Jewish students barricaded themselves in a room. Police had to eventually escort the small
group to safety. But this was not the first time police involvement on
campus was needed. That same year police were called to Kings College
after a student Israel society was attacked by demonstrators, and one of
their officers Esther Endfield reported an assault. Eyewitnesses described a mob throwing chairs and smashing windows. The meeting had to be stopped and the building evacuated.
Anti-Israel students interrupt an event with an Israeli speaker at UCL
Next came Oxford University’s turn, as the
co-chair of its student Labour club Alex Chalmers resigned in protest
after claiming that its members have “some kind of problem with Jews”.
Senior members of Oxford’s Labour club had apparently expressed their
solidarity with Hamas and its terrorist methods of killing Israeli
civilians. A second Labour club officer Brahma Mohanty soon followed,
resigning in disgust. Not be outdone, York University had to award
Jewish student Zachary Confino £1,000 in compensation after he endured
two years of repeated anti-Semitic abuse as an undergraduate. The union
has issued a written apology after it was accepted that the university
had failed to intervene.
Students banging on windows and disrupting an Israeli speaker at King’s College London
This was followed by Exeter, where students
were photographed wearing T-shirts with racist and anti-Semitic slogans
daubed on them at a sports club social event. The phrases included: “The
Holocaust was a good time.” And this week, anonymous anti-Semitic slogans
also made an appearance at Goldsmiths University as graffiti appeared on
a noticeboard calling on sociology professor David Hirsh, an expert on
anti-Semitism, to be expelled for being a “bitter Jew”.
The student noticeboard calling for ‘Bitter Jew’ David Hirsh’s head
If by now you’re worried that this is looking
like a national problem, then you are right. Things have not been this
bad for a lifetime, and the lead is coming from the top, the National
Union of Students (NUS) itself. Last summer the NUS passed a motion removing
the right of Jewish students to vote for their own representative on
the union’s Anti-Racism and Anti-Fascism committee. The NUS also held debates on whether to drop
Holocaust Memorial Day commemorations, to which large numbers of
attendees reportedly cheered and applauded. The election of Malia Bouattia as the head of the NUS leaves little room for hope that things will change.
Malia Bouattia, the controversial anti-Israel NUS president
In 2011 the now NUS president wrote that
Birmingham University was “something of a Zionist outpost”. By 2014 she
was arguing in a speech called “Gaza and the Palestinian Revolution”
that boycotts and non-violent protests were insufficient. For Bouattia,
the only way to free Palestine was to take orders on resistance from
what she called “Palestinians on the ground”. Bouattia was also responsible for the efforts
to block an NUS motion condemning ISIS as a terrorist organisation and
to show solidarity with the Kurds. The claim was that this would be read
as Islamophobic. After much condemnation a reworded motion was later
passed. The NUS did adopt a motion with relative ease
to boycott Israel. Curiously, the same logic was not used and this was
not deemed anti-Semitic. Matters came to a head last September as 44
student leaders signed an open letter stating that Jewish students did
not feel safe participating in the national student movement. How did it all come to this? The perfect storm: Islamist theocrats, their regressive left apologists and right wing populists. Though they may hate each other, they agree to
hate on Jews more. I call this Europe’s triple threat, and it is
tearing our political culture asunder, poisoning our discourse and
leaving a nasty aftertaste to campus activism. No surer sign of rising fascism have we had in
our history than the scapegoating of our Jewish communities. Alarm
bells should be sounding, and yet they are not.
This week, we remember the tragedy that was
the Holocaust. An atrocity made so easy because Europe was allowed to
sleep walk into anti-Semitic hysteria. So ponder this. Last month the government’s
first higher education adjudicator, cross-bench peer Baroness Ruth
Deech, warned that certain UK universities are becoming no-go zones for
Jews.
No-go zones, she said. Never again, we had promised.
